January 10 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of David Bowie, one of the best-loved British musicians there has ever been. In truth, it doesn’t seem like a decade that he has been gone, because even though he is no longer around, the steady stream of reissues, live albums and biographies that have emerged since 2016 means his presence is always felt.

Younger artists from Lady Gaga and the Last Dinner Party to Charli xcx and the Arctic Monkeys are open about how indebted to Bowie they are, and he has inspired everyone from politicians – most notably David Cameron, a fully paid-up fan who called the other David “a master of re-invention, who kept getting it right” – to filmmakers including Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, who both cast him in their pictures.

In terms of personal and cultural influence in Britain, Bowie is probably second only to the Beatles, and in terms of longevity he long surpassed them too. It might be going too far to call him a national treasure – as someone who turned down a knighthood, he was averse to any kind of public fawning over him – but he remains one of the most popular rock stars that the country ever produced, a proud Londoner whose many years living in Switzerland and New York never diluted his love for his home country, nor the affection the British feel for him today. Yet three and a half decades ago, it was a very different story.

The music critic Jon Wilde ended one especially damning review with the words, “sit down, man, you’re a f***** disgrace”, and as Bowie struggled to interest the world in the dire hard-rock act Tin Machine that he founded in the late Eighties, it seemed as if the man who fell to earth was now the man who was washed up.

But 25 years later, Bowie could release his final album, in the form of the magnificent swansong Blackstar, two days before his death, and know that he would be remembered as a god amongst mere mortals as long as his music is listened to, and loved. What changed, and what went so right in the interim?

Bowie initially came to fame in 1969, after several false starts, with his hit single Space Oddity. Released on July 11 that year, it became far more prominent when the BBC used it as background music ten days later to accompany their footage of the Apollo 11 moon landings. A top five hit, it ensured the former David Jones, who had been regarded by many as a novelty pop singer who had yet to achieve the success he thought he deserved, soon became a household name.

Album after album followed, including the excellent Hunky Dory – which spawned one of his best-known and most-loved songs, Life on Mars – and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a lavish concept album revolving around the idea of Bowie as the eponymous Ziggy, a “rock ‘n’ roll messiah” who comes to earth when the planet is said to be doomed.

He presented himself as a master of reinvention, a man who would switch bands, collaborators and musical styles from one year, even one month, to the next.

He recorded boundary-pushing new-wave rock in Berlin with Brian Eno, resulting in such albums as Low and “Heroes”, and produced the dazzling Station to Station during a period when he was apparently living off cocaine, red peppers and milk, and storing his urine in jars for fear it would be stolen by witches.

He released one of his greatest-ever albums in 1980, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and then followed it up with his bestselling LP, 1983’s Let’s Dance, in which the once-uncompromising rocker successfully transformed himself into a pop idol. Idea after idea flowed from him, and he received adulation that his jealous peers could only dream about. And then it all went wrong. If Bowie had sold his soul to the devil to achieve earthly success, Satan came to collect at some point in 1987, when his client released his first truly dire album, Never Let Me Down.

His previous release, Tonight, had been rocky too, but was saved by its singles, but there was no such redemption for this release, which sold relatively poorly and was laughed at by critics and music lovers alike.

Bowie, stung, announced that he would form Tin Machine in an attempt to get back to the Ziggy days of restless creativity. Yet even as he kept telling the world that he was just a guy in a band now, not the all-conquering icon of music he had once been, few believed him.

Growing up in the Eighties and Nineties, I thought of Bowie as being a bit like Sting and Phil Collins: a successful middle-aged man producing the kind of tasteful but boring music that aspirational estate agents might listen to on their CD player in their car. In fact, Bowie’s misses were even worse than that.

Tin Machine produced two albums which nobody much liked, and then his big 1993 comeback album, Black Tie White Noise, may have been produced by Nile Rodgers but its ragtag collection of covers and songs earnestly criticising the evils of racism failed to chime with the mood of a country emerging into the Britpop era of Blur and Oasis.

Marriage to the model Iman gave him personal fulfilment, and a reunion with Eno on the 1995 album Outside saw him produce his best work in over a decade, but the mainstream had moved on by then.

Attempts at reclaiming the zeitgeist stuttered – his drum ‘n’ bass album Earthling was actively embarrassing, like seeing your father wearing hot pants – but when he triumphantly headlined Glastonbury in 2000, the world remembered why they’d loved Bowie so much in the first place, as he played the greatest hits set that he swore he’d never play again, and gave festivalgoers the experience of their lives.

Two more acclaimed albums followed, Heathen and Reality, and Bowie seemed comfortable with his reassumed place in the rock firmament, as a fondly regarded visionary who took delight in being a new parent and in thrilling audiences all over again in the process.

Tragedy struck when he suffered a near-fatal heart attack on tour in 2004 and retired from music for the best part of a decade, although he was hardly a recluse: he acted in Nolan’s The Prestige, sang on a Scarlett Johansson album and made guest appearances with the likes of Arcade Fire and David Gilmour.

And then he was ready to come back, which he did with 2013’s triumphant The Next Day. He never performed live again, or gave another interview, but he made teasing appearances here and there, such as when he sent Kate Moss to pick up a Brit award on his behalf and got her to deliver a pro-union message just before the Scottish independence referendum.

He would then record and release Blackstar, one of his greatest ever albums, but he knew it was a last gift to his fans, as he was diagnosed with terminal cancer during its creation. In a final spurt of creativity, he co-wrote a musical, Lazarus, and even planned another, with the working title The Spectator, which was revealed to the world when the David Bowie Centre opened at V&A East in September 2025, along with thousands of other artefacts, documents and costumes.

When he died, grief-stricken fans flocked to London and New York to play his songs and comfort one other. A sign said, appropriately enough: “The Starman has returned home.”

I have wanted to write about Bowie pretty much all my life, but was never sure what the right story to tell was. Finally, the answer came. In Lazarus, I explore what it was to have been acclaimed and successful, then to struggle, and, finally, to attain a level of respect and love unmatched by other, more mundane musicians.

It is no hagiography – interviewing those who worked with him, many have some strong words and irreverent judgements about a man who always knew what he wanted – but it is, I hope, the definitive account of Bowie’s later life and career.

And the best part is that, far from putting me off his music, I listen to it even more now, with renewed respect and admiration. Starman, hero, poet – Dave from Brixton was all those things, but above all else, he was a legend, and that, I am sure, is how he would like to be remembered, a decade on.

• Lazarus The Second Coming of David Bowie, by Alexander Larman (New Modern, £25) is out now